


Atomic

by arby



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-18
Updated: 2008-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:32:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arby/pseuds/arby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter always knew the world would end in white fire - he'd been burning half his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atomic

**Author's Note:**

> AU for Season One - Claire doesn't exist (or they don't know about her) in this reality.

_"A substantial energy barrier of electrostatic forces must be overcome before fusion can occur. At large distances two naked nuclei repel one another because of the repulsive electrostatic force between their positively charged protons. If two nuclei can be brought close enough together, however, the electrostatic repulsion can be overcome by the attractive nuclear force which is stronger at close distances."_ – Wikipedia on Nuclear Fusion

* * *

  


He stands at the edge of a precipice, filled with a pain so pure and sweet, piercing, high-pitched as angelsong, and its white-hot light threatens to explode. He's struggling to stop it from leaking out, contaminating the air, as it burns him alive from the inside out, until finally he takes a step forward as if he thinks he can escape and everything goes white.

* * * *

"You were saying?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You said, 'When I looked at my brother, I saw' and then you stopped."

"Oh." Nathan forced himself to say the most innocuous thing he could come up with. "I saw myself – but not the way I am now. I saw the way I could have been; should have been. Before I started making compromises."

"You feel he had more integrity than you do."

"If that's what you call it when you don't care what other people think. He never has. Cared, I mean. I scolded him about that all the time – because it often reflected badly on me, and I cared a great deal about that – but secretly I envied him for it. It gave him a great deal of... freedom."

"Is that why you wish you could fly? To get away from your responsibilities?"

Nathan was taken aback by this for several reasons, the most pertinent being that his ability to fly had gone far beyond wishing. But he couldn't say that here. He paused, as if he were considering the statement at face value, but what came out of his own mouth surprised him.

"I remember this one time... Pete got beaten up."

"Did that happen often?"

"When he went to grade school, yeah."

"Did you get beaten up in elementary school, too?"

"Not exactly."

_I was more likely to be the one administering the beatings._

* * * * 

He remembers how hot it was that afternoon, how he rounded a corner and saw Peter in the road, half-broken and bloody, clothes ripped and dirty, and Nathan's heart almost stopped with fear and an inchoate rage that stained his vision red for a minute.

Nathan wasn't strong enough yet to pick him up fully, so he had to drag Peter, first under the tree, then around the trunk. The flies droned in chorus like ministers in dusty black suits as his brother tried to laugh it off. He obviously didn't get it. At the time, Nathan didn't fully get it either. Seeing Pete like that - it broke something inside Nathan. It was like a switch had gone off in his head. All he knew was that he couldn't risk losing Peter, whatever the cost to himself. As Celeste said about Nathan's GPA slipping below 4.0, it just wasn't an option.

Time seemed to coagulate to a stop, like the blood on Peter's face, the sunlight globing into great golden blobs that trapped them in each minute like bugs in amber. Peter's nose was trickling blood at a glacial pace, while his left eye slowly but surely swelled to a shiner.

"What'd you do, what happened?" (In retrospect he cringes at the accusatory tone, the assumption that Peter was somehow to blame.) His teeth seemed to be gritting themselves with rage.

"Nothing. I don't know. I was walking home. They came by, saw me..." he looked half-shamed, half-defiant, that look Nathan knew too well. "They started throwing stones."

"How did you react?"

"I stared into space and said nothing. Eventually they got bored and went away."

* * * *

He'd frozen like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk. Every time he remembered it Peter felt sick all over again, hated himself for his cowardice.

Beatings had happened before, nothing so serious but Peter just happened to be the preferred target of any random bully in the vicinity, some visiting from other towns. They made a habit of stopping by the white wooden house on the corner because he made such good prey.

But this time was different. Nathan was looking at him with an indescribable expression, almost as if Peter were unbearably important to him. Nathan was looking like he _felt_ something and it was shockingly intimate.

Peter felt a wrenching, as if his soul was tearing loose from his body; as if his bones were being pulled to taffy by a nearby black hole. He didn't think, he just reacted to the pain in an instinctive outflowing of emotion and love, and touched Nathan's face tenderly. The sensation narrowed, transmuted somehow - it twisted inside him like a knife. Peter felt it filling him like light, or helium - some kind of new element. Then its edge turned sweet, and as he met Nathan's gaze he saw tears glinting unshed, rendering those gimlet eyes strangely glassy. Nathan's stare seemed to open endless hazel doors inside Peter. He didn't understand what Nathan wanted, but for the first time he _knew_ his brother loved him. He could feel the powerful need there, that drove him to meet it with love. Nathan needed Peter so badly Peter couldn't refuse him. Peter gave him what he was asking for without so many words – gladly, willingly, out of love and compassion. The pain didn't diminish but transformed again, into a sort of wild despairing joy.

Nathan remained in the dark, though the sun burned them to cinders.

* * * *

_What'd_ you _do on your summer vacation, Pete?_ Nathan thought afterwards, half-hysterical. _I found out my brother likes me_ that _way._

* * * *

After that it was foregone, and Peter was torn between loving Nathan and resenting him for being so distant for all those years before. He'd been ignored for so long that any crumb of tenderness, of feeling, felt like a feast. And he hated himself for every minute he spent living on that charity.

He was to feel that mysterious pain again many times. It seemed to have something to do with Nathan, it ebbed and flowed with Nathan's interest in him.

Sitting at the table in the breakfast nook as the housekeeper made eggs, Nathan leaning against the counter, practicing his Spanish by reciting his vocabulary words out of order, casually popping bacon in his mouth, and suddenly Peter feels it like someone has plucked up the stopper in the drain of his heart, all the love is getting sucked out, in a great agonizing rush it goes and he meets Nathan's gaze, wanting to cry. The kitchen back then had been decorated in soft shades of green and gold, like a magical sentient forest out of Tolkien. Nathan crunches the bacon with audible pleasure, as if he were cracking bones - he's relishing it enough for five pigs' death. And he's watching Peter, has been watching the whole time. As Peter meets his inscrutable stare, there's a tangible electric shock of feeling. Nathan nods almost imperceptibly and Peter knows they'll be meeting later. Stifled and secret in the stairwell to the servants' quarters, desperate and urgent in the cathedral of the deep woods surrounding their house, with a hushed audience of crickets and birds, or languid and tender in each other's beds at midnight, they will be conjoined and united in a way that dredges the bottom of their souls; Nathan will relieve his shame upon his brother and afterwards he will feel better. Peter will give, as he has given, because it is not in his nature to hold back when he has something to offer, no matter why or who was asking. Peter gives because for those few snatched moments he has what he's always wanted - to be the sole focus of Nathan's attention.

For a long time he thinks it's worth it, even though the pain is like a white-hot wound filling him with agony lighter than air, until he dreams that this was how he'll go, a silent explosion of sweet silvery sensation, crackling like tinsel, an atom bomb turning the world white beyond comprehension, into overexposed film.

* * * *

Sometimes Nathan thought that day under the tree he had given some vital part of himself over, made Peter into his conscience. That day was the first of many moral compromises he had made, and they seemed to get easier and easier to make. Peter carried the burden of morality for Nathan like a compass. And Nathan let him, in so doing he made Peter carry the burden of righteousness for both of them.

* * * *

Peter knew that Nathan was not okay with everything, not really - his wife, his career, all these things he had roped himself into doing because their father needed an heir of the appearance, not just the flesh. Their relationship took a turn, evolved into something more symbiotic than mere brothers, and there was no untangling those threads of love and need and pain.

* * * *

The first time his hands started to glow, Peter almost didn't believe it. _This isn't right_, he thought dully as he stared at them, fighting to control it somewhere in the back of his mind, this coarse alien power, in fact it was all wrong. _This is not how it ends._

He stopped it from taking over that time, but his dreams didn't change, it was the white light and the sweet pain of Nathan's love that ended him still. Sometimes he wondered if it was prophetic or mere wish-fulfillment, whether he subconsciously wanted out. It was just so hard sometimes, to know that Nathan was doing things he himself thought were wrong, and yet Peter was the one who got all the guilt.

* * * *

He had rehearsed it in his dreams so many times that he was almost resigned to death by the time Nathan showed up. _Of course, it couldn't be that easy._

"Nathan, will you get the fuck out of here - I can't hold it in much longer!"

Nathan shouted at him as he tried to get closer, buffeted back by the white light and the high winds whipping around them both at terrifying speeds, "You can't die! I don't know what I'd do...I don't know who I _am_ without you. I can't stand losing you. I just can't."

A tiny part of Peter's brain that wasn't caught up in the whole dying endeavor thought to itself, _that's a Police song -- and a good one, too_, and he almost smiled. Then he thought, _I'm the one who's dying here, and still_ "it's all about you, Nathan."

It was as if a lightbulb, instead of going off, had shattered inside his head. Peter looked at Nathan and for the first time in his life realized that the intense pain he was feeling _wasn't his_, _had never been his_. He was feeling what _Nathan_ was feeling, somehow even more strongly than Nathan felt it himself – he was intensifying the emotions like a magnifying glass. This filled him with such intense pity that he shut his eyes against his brother as at a supernova. Or maybe it was self-pity, it was hard to tell - he honestly didn't know if he felt for himself, if he'd ever felt this strongly for himself alone, as if he didn't deserve it.

And then something slammed into him, he was tackled and rushed as if by a football player, lifted and rising high above the earth. Just when he thought his heart would explode like a firecracker, to rain down silver sparkles drifting down snow-silent, he pounded Nathan's shoulder with his free hand, and Nathan stopped.

A cold dark clarity passed through Peter's chest like a draught of ice water in July, and he heard himself say, "All you do is take my love and give me pain in return - I can't do this any more."

His chest filled with a molten agony, an unknown emotion half-anger, half-hatred, all-consuming, like a column of burning lava, as the remnants of his old life were boiled away, and as he arrowed towards the ocean like a bird he allowed himself to feel a longing he'd long tried to deny, a yearning, to anticipate that dark cool oblivion.

* * * *

"And that was the last time you saw Peter?"

He stared at his hands for a long time. He was a hollowed-out thing, a manikin. Peter had burnt out all the soft parts, the breathing being, when he went down in a ball of flames like a meteorite. The creature sitting here was merely the discarded shell of the man who had once answered to the name of Nathan Petrelli.

"Yes." _Two years, seven months and sixteen days ago_, he refrained from adding.

"Do you believe he's still alive?"

"Yes."

"You were accused of killing him."

"They can't prove I did. I can't prove I didn't."

"Why do you insist on torturing yourself like this?"

_Because it was all my fault. If I pretend he's alive I still have the chance to tell him I'm sorry. _

_If he's still alive, maybe he's happy somewhere. Or maybe he hates me. _

_Either way, he's free of my burdens._

"They never found a body." He wasn't sure who said it. The voice sounded far away.

A tiny voice inside him said quietly, _Pete wouldn't want this._

He answered it bitterly, _Pete didn't want a lot of things I gave him. Didn't stop me before - why should I listen now?_

Something spoke into the ringing silence: "If I could see him again. I just want - I just want to tell him that I'm sorry."

"You can say it anyway. For you."

"I am. For everything I did to him, his whole life. I've been sorry for a long time. Doesn't matter now. Won't bring him back."

There was another strangely charged silence. The golem that used to be called Nathan sat inside its skin like a hermit crab in a shell. It saw no reason to come out. It was too late to save the only one it really loved, but caused nothing but pain. It didn't matter anymore. Nothing did.


End file.
